


Half Life

by Cards_Slash



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 13:47:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6959143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Desmond had two lives: the future he remembered living in and the present he woke up in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Half Life

**Author's Note:**

> from the prompt:  
> Character A time travels back to the past to kill Character B. It's necessary because Character B has turned into a monster (metaphorically or literally) that will end the world or something equally terrible. But you know, Character B wasn't always like that...

They met at a roadside dive, in between busted Formica tables when he was clearing away endlessly wasteful half-full glasses. She was quick on her feet with blond-blonde hair always pulled away from her face and the awful puke-pink button down dress clinging to her breasts and hips. Her smile was petal pink on her pale face; always lingering on his back.

It had gone on for months, that smile, when she finally stopped him between table 18 and table 24 (covered in ketchup courtesy of some kid who would never know how lucky they had it). Her fingers folded over the gray bin he used to bus the tables. She said, “so what’s the deal with you, what do I have to do to let you know I’m interested?”

Desmond was no good (no good at all) at interacting when all this time-and-energy went to being _normal_ in this dizzying world. He tried to smile when he said, “well I used to be crazy.”

Her name was Lucy (so the nameplate said) and she cocked up an eyebrow and looked him over from head-to-foot, “which kind of crazy?”

Their boss was shouting from the counter and Lucy was rolling her eyes with an insincere smile. “We’re finishing this conversation later,” she said (like a threat).

\--

Desmond’s life was _halved_ , caught between everything he _remembered_ (but could not possibly be true) before he appeared very suddenly in New York City (naked and scarred and _lost_ ) and now. He had been arrested and committed and _treated_ by Abstergo’s Mental Health Outreach Center. 

There was a Doctor there with gray hair and a round belly (bigger than any stomach Desmond had ever seen at that time) who sat across a sterile room and listened with deliberate disbelief to everything that Desmond said to him. The story went like this:

A monster was born in South Dakota on December 21, 2012. He didn’t look much different than any other human; he fit right in with the kids that rode his bus and went to his school but he grew up and he killed the world. The boy (they said) had his father’s face and his Mother’s eyes; he had a mind with infinite possibility and no-soul-at-all. He made a plan when he was still a child that he could destroy the planet before he turned sixty. Desmond was born just before the sky went dark in 2056. 

Dr. (Vidic, his name), had nodded his head along to the rhythm of Desmond’s words and he had said, ‘How did you get here?’

Desmond told him how it had gone: there was a machine, like a glass egg that they built in desperation, when the last of the power plants were failing and the last plague had killed their hopes of survival. Desmond told him about the sanitary white rooms where they kept him; about the training they had forced on him, about the ones that had gone before him. 

\--

Desmond was twenty four when he met Lucy for coffee at the family-owned bistro on the corner of Pine and Elm. He was _off his meds_ and doing well (so they told him). She was chin-on-palm, elbow-against the table, listening to him tell her how he had no life before he was sixteen and they hadn’t let him out until he was twenty.

“Well,” she said like an answer to his story, “I ran away from home when I was fifteen, I pushed this guy who tried to rape me into traffic and I was charged with but acquitted of manslaughter. So, I think I’ve got you beat.” Then she picked up her cup of coffee with a sweet-sweet smile and he thought it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life. “I mean, unless you killed someone.”

“Well,” he said (since they were sharing secrets), “I am supposed to kill someone.”

Lucy laughed. “Your delusion is like a mirror image of the Terminator movies. He was sent back to save someone and you’ve been sent back to kill them. How were you supposed to know who he was?”

“I know when he was born,” Desmond said. (But he didn’t say, that he had seen him. The impossible reality of the monster who had destroyed their whole world, who sat on his throne in a command room of all-white-walls, reading books of poetry to the sound of the world dying.

Lucy laughed-and-laughed. “That narrows it down.”

\--

There was no luxury in the world of his delusions. There were no beds, there was no music, there was no light, and there was no warmth or hope or happiness. The grim reality of Desmond’s prior life was only the certainty of death. 

Vidic told him his mind had cracked; based on the scars they found on his body it was likely he had suffered abuse so severe that he had simply shattered reality to find peace. He said, maybe it was better if Desmond never remembered.

\--

Lucy decided to date him and Desmond was powerless to defend himself from her. It was her fingers threaded through his, her voice at his side, dragging him through the local art museum on free weekends, running a long-long commentary about everything they saw.

Desmond sat on the wooden benches and stared at the colors (the impossible reality of them) and she leaned against his side and she said, “tell me everything you’re thinking,” in a way so wholly different than Vidic-ever-had. Desmond said, “I’m thinking, I never understood beauty before.” 

\--

They ate picnics on the grass, watching the sun go up and the sun go down. She took him to music stores and sat him on little stools and taught him how to use the guitars and the drums. 

They were wild children in department stores, trying on clothes they never intended to buy. She dragged him from section to section, until they were sore from laughing with piles of clothes at their feet in the changing rooms. The stern-faced-women with no sense of humor were banging on the doors telling them to get-out-get-out-get out.

Lucy took him to a bonfire with warm beer and tall flames. She sat on his lap wearing nothing but cut-off-shorts and a white-white-tank top. His hands were big against her leg with her slim arm around his neck. An aspiring band struck up a tune over the crackle of the fire and Desmond sank into the relaxed sag of the old chair he’d been offered and closed his eyes. 

\--

But there was a regular that sat the counter and slapped Lucy’s ass when she walked past him. He was a lewd-smirking asshole with meaty hands. Lucy was red-faced and white-knuckled every time he came because she couldn’t _do_ anything because the old man was a friend of a friend of the owner and he had to be _tolerated_ despite his faults. 

Desmond grew up in hell (real or imagined) and the drugs they had kept him on for years (and years and years) had dulled him to a blunt point, but he’d been off his meds for six-months or more and his head getting sharper and his memories were back in focus. 

Lucy was neatly boxed in by expectations and social rules but Desmond was (formerly) insane and he considered his defense carefully before he grabbed the man across the counter and pulled his head down so hard it split his skin open all across his forehead. “ _Don’t_ touch her,” Desmond snarled at him and the blood that poured down his disbelieving face.

\--

Lucy dragged him home with her two weeks before he turned twenty five. She stripped him naked in the tiny square of her bedroom and fucked him with more violence than he could have ever imagined. He was panting and helpless against her. When they were finished and the sweat had cooled, she walked her fingertips across his scars. 

“Do you think it’s possible what you remember is real?” she asked.

“I don’t know anymore,” Desmond said. He looked down at his own chest and traced his thumb across the gouge that seemed so severe it couldn’t be denied as the truth. “The doctors said I was probably abused.”

Lucy rolled her eyes at that and shifted her body so she was leaning up against him warm and damp and perfect. “If it’s a choice between a mission to save the planet and this kind of abuse, I think I’d pick savior of the planet too.” 

\--

It was hard to get a job as a non-existent person, former mental patient, recently assaulted a paying customer busboy. Lucy had a friend who was a manager at a store who needed stockers and Desmond was strong and willing to work any shift he had to. He was busy learning how to put cereal on a shelf while Lucy was busy at the diner she hated. They made something like a life together, buying a real dining room table from a thrift store that they had to carry six blocks to their apartment.

She bought plastic flowers and he found a pretty glass vase (only a little chipped) in the trash and they ate breakfast like dining at a fancy French place, feeling like kings.

\--

Lucy found out she was pregnant in June like getting slapped in the face. She came back from the doctors red-spotted and _furious_. “I’m _three_ months pregnant!” she shouted at him. “I’m _pregnant_! Explain to me how I’m pregnant!”

Desmond couldn’t have explained it to her even if the question hadn’t been rhetorical. He said, “nobody’s given birth to a baby since I was a toddler,” he said, “the youngest person that we knew of was fourteen years old when they sent me back. Even if someone could get pregnant, they couldn’t keep it.”

Lucy’s eyebrows were rolled in furrows like she was _disgusted_ and there was no telling if it was because of what he said or because he was ignoring the problem, but she just motioned her hand to the side and then slapped it against the table top. “Well fucking is how you get knocked up except I’m on birth control and we’re still using condoms so apparently along with time travel and world savior, you’ve also got miracle sperm.”

Desmond said, “what’s sperm?”

Lucy just hung her head and pinched her nose. “I can’t Desmond. I just can’t. How are we going to have a baby?” Then she sat down on the chair opposite him. 

“We can do it,” he said. His fingers threaded through hers and she smiled at him. “We can do anything.”

\--

It was a week later (maybe) give or take, before Lucy spit a mouthful of come out of her mouth and held it up to his face. She was wiping her chin as she crawled up his body, saying, “this is sperm.” Then she rubbed it across his face with more meanness than she had ever shown before. 

While he was scrubbing his face clean on his dirty shirts, she was laughing on the bed, all sprawled thighs and smirking lips, saying, “that’s what you get for getting me pregnant.”

\--

Desmond learned to read when he was seventeen, in the calm and quiet rooms of Abstergo. Vidic could explain away anything and he said, “whoever hurt you obviously didn’t want care if you were educated.”

But Desmond thought it was because the Monster that ended the world had taken out the schools first. It was part of his plan, (they said, those scientists that were alive before the world started to die), people were easier to kill when they were stupid.

\--

Lucy got round as the days got short. She was surly and mean, tired from working and ‘getting fat’ (so she said). Desmond liked the shape of her in their bed, the firm roundness of her belly as she snoozed next to him after he’d rubbed her feet or her back. He rested his hand against the fluttering motion of their baby inside of her.

It was best (he thought) that he never think how close they were to the end. It was best not to wonder if his child would survive the end of the world, if it would die in the first attacks or if it would persist until the bitter end when the sun was gone.

\--

In December, Desmond went to New York, to the Abstergo Mental Health Outreach and he sat on the couches in the waiting room listening to the mundane voice on the screen assuring him that he would be seen soon. He closed his eyes to the smell of the place, and the feel of the carpet beneath his feet. 

Survival screamed in his head; the delusions had swollen so fat that he couldn’t contain them. Every edge of his mind was sharp again and he remembered the face of the scientist that put him in the machine. He remembered the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes, the grayness of her skin and the bright-bright blue of her irises left undimmed by the illness that was turning the whites yellow and spotty. 

Desmond remembered her voice, hoarse with old-old age, when she said, ‘remember?’

He remembered the glass shell of the machine and the promise he’d been tasked with, the one he’d agreed to when he said, ‘yes I remember.’

“I think I’m slipping,” Desmond said to Vidic. “I can’t separate what’s real anymore.” He nodded because it was true (because he thought, that woman, that old-old-woman who they called the scientist, her eyes were as blue as Lucy’s and wasn’t it funny how old Lucy would be sixty years from today). “I don’t want to come back in, my baby is going to be born soon.”

Vidic sighed, “it would be best if you did.”

“I’m not a threat,” he said, “but I think maybe I should have my medicine back.”

\--

Desmond didn’t tell Lucy; but she must have known. Because she was giving him curious stares out of the corner of her eyes as he slid back into the gray of the medicine fog. 

\--

His son was born on December 21, 2012. The boy was pink-and-perfect. The doctor laid him across Lucy’s chest with a smile and a congratulations, telling them that he had never seen a baby with eyes so blue.

\--

They found a rocking chair in someone’s trash that Desmond washed up and fixed so they had a good place to rock the baby to sleep. Lucy slept in the afternoons after Desmond woke up and before he went to work, and Desmond rocked their son so he stayed quiet. He kissed his forehead just beneath the curl of his blond hair. He memorized the sweetness of his face.

\--

Desmond got promoted before Ryder (Lucy named their son) learned to walk. The extra money was useful because diapers cost more than food and Lucy lost her job for slapping a customer who grabbed her arm. 

They were starving and delighted, sitting on opposite sides of their tiny living room clapping their hands as their son wobbled on his fat legs arms out in the air, giggling in triumph. “Good job,” Lucy was saying when she kissed his round cheeks, “that’s my boy, that’s my perfect little boy.” 

\--

“Desmond,” Lucy whispered into his chest after dark, when the sound of Ryder’s breathing in his crib was a lonely soundtrack to sleep to. The room was warm because Lucy was still looking for a job and air conditioning cost money. “Maybe you could stop taking the meds now? I miss you, I miss you all the time.”

He kiss her forehead and he thought it felt gray (felt like nothing at all, really) but there was a small fire set somewhere in his chest that could almost remember the full-living-feeling of loving her. He nodded his head, “we could try,” he promised.

\--

Ryder got nothing for his first birthday (but a cupcake) but Lucy made it up to him for his fifteenth month birthday after she got a job that paid double what her shitty waitress job did. It was answering phones at a start-up business looking to change the course of the world. (As Lucy put it, a bunch of bored billionaires were conned into forking over money to a company dedicated to learning how to live forever, and she took their money and laughed at them behind their back.)

\--

Desmond made a Dad-friend at the park (so Lucy told him) when he took Ryder to play in the dirt with the other round-bellied toddlers. His son was studious and quiet around the boys that ran like wild animals inside the mulch-interior of the playground. Ryder liked the swings when Desmond pushed him and the liked the top of the slide where he could stand with his arms behind his back and his quick-blue-eyes observing the people below him. 

But Desmond’s Dad-friend was barrel-chested and bearded, with a skinny little boy who wore blue jeans and red flannel shirts. His Dad friend worked in construction and laughed crudely at poor jokes and thought a black president would ruin the world. 

Sometimes, Ryder stared at his Dad-friend, with his eyes narrowed and his mouth pulled flat at the edges. 

\--

They didn’t have the money for daycare, so they worked in cycles. Desmond worked nights and Lucy worked days, and they slept in the overlapping times. Ryder was tall for a two year old. He was _smart_ in a way his pediatricians couldn’t _believe_. 

Desmond came home one morning to Lucy sitting in the center of the living room, crying rivers down her face because Ryder was two years old, reading her magazine pages with a quirk of a smirk at the edge of his face that was so perfectly proud of itself. 

“He _can read_ ,” Lucy said. “Show Daddy,” she said to Ryder.

And Desmond sat and listened to his son. (Thinking, thinking, how strange it was how very much Lucy looked like the woman that said _remember_ to him fifty eight years from now.) 

\--

Ryder was almost three when a kid died on the playground. Desmond was holding his hand when the ambulance and the police officer came like great screaming beasts, arriving too late to save the child. Ryder stood by his side with a mask of fear that didn’t bleed into the set of his shoulders or his perfectly still feet.

No, his son stood at his side and watched the horrific spectacle of sobbing parents cradling their son. He stared at the dead boy; how peaceful he looked in death. 

But Ryder cried against his Mom’s chest that night, with his fingers curled into her clothes until Lucy was crying with him, and Desmond stood at the door of his room thinking about that dead boy, and about his living boy.

\--

Desmond had seen the monster’s face when he was still a child. It was there, in his head, beneath the debris that Abstergo had carelessly thrown into his skull. That face followed him in dreams, appearing in mirrors and windows and photographs. It woke him up during fitful nightmares and nagged at him through long shifts.

Lucy said, “he looks so much like you,” with _awe_. “But he has my eyes.”

\--

Ryder was four, sitting at the table with a spread of paper and a stubby pencil, making lists that he never let his Mother see. 

“Son,” Desmond said to him (when all the edges of his mind were sharp again). 

“Yes?” Ryder asked. And he did have Desmond’s face, just like the legends said he would. He had the shape of his eyes, the curve of his mouth, the point of his nose. He was, in almost every way, a perfect clone of him. The only thing that was different was the brilliant blue of his eyes. Even his hair, once so blonde, was growing darker now. 

“Do you believe in monsters?”

“No,” Ryder said. “Why?”

Desmond sighed, “well, if you knew that someone would grow up and do something very bad to the whole world. What would you do?”

Ryder’s face squeezed to a point of concentration. He sat back on his knees in the chair, the tips of his fingers spread across his lists-and-lists of things. The tip of the pencil eraser pressed against his mouth until he finally said, “does the world deserve it?”

“No,” Desmond said.

Ryder looked at him with pity. “Then it should have stopped him.” Then he went back to his papers.

\--

Desmond kissed Lucy in the morning when she went to work and he said, “remember to say good bye to Ryder.”

“I’ll see him tonight,” she said with a lingering smile. But she picked him up anyway and she held him to her chest. Her lips left smothering kisses on his cheek and he smiled at her like he _loved_ her with both his arms over her shoulders and his sweet little voice wishing her a great day at work. “I love you,” she said to him. And, “be good.”

\--

Desmond fed him macaroni and cheese because Ryder liked it best. They sat in silence while he ate, and when he was finished, Desmond said, “I used to live in the future. There was a man there that decided the world deserve to die when he was a child. And he did it, he killed everyone on the planet—he was very smart. He was very, very terribly smart. But I think he had one weakness.”

Ryder cocked his head, “are you okay?”

“I think he loved his Mother,” Desmond said. He nodded. There was a thickness in his throat, like the knife in his slick palm beneath the table. “I think, he could kill everyone but he couldn’t kill her and she—I think she knew it was him, that whole time and she couldn’t kill him either. Do you think you could kill your Mother?”

Ryder set his fork against the table with complete civility. He wasn’t a child, but the immature form of the monster that turned the sky black. “No,” was _absolute_. “I would never kill my Mother.”

“I know,” Desmond said. He nodded again. His face was wet (with sweat, and tears), and he cleared his throat like he could ease the rawness of it. “I know,” he said again, “and she could never kill you. No matter what you did. She loves you.”

“I’m not a monster yet,” Ryder said. The words were _innocent_ , the way he had been when he was still rounder than he was tall. The way his breath had been against Desmond’s chest when he was a baby. He was innocent like the day he was born (December 21, 2012). 

“But you will be,” Desmond said. He lifted his hand so the knife was on the table between them. Ryder looked at it without fear, the way he’d looked at the dead boy on the playground, and then he looked up at Desmond. There was no malice in his face; there was only a slight sigh of embarrassment. “I promised her that I would do this; I didn’t know that it was because she couldn’t. I love her as much as you do.” 

Ryder looked down at his plate, at the smears of macaroni and cheese, and then at his fork. He sighed as he picked it up. And he looked over at Desmond with pity. “I tried to love you,” he said. “I really did.”


End file.
